Is dorian gray gay
Published in:November-December 2014 issue.
THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat salacious title, The Secret Existence of Oscar Wilde (2005), by Neil McKenna. While Hattersley doesn’t directly mention the question of The Picture of Dorian Gray’s primacy as a lgbtq+ novel, he does venture that it was, “while prudent, implicitly homosexual”—at least for cognoscenti who knew what to look for.
This obfuscation is what makes Dorian Gray’s place in the gay canon so open to debate. The novel’s very coyness on the matter of homosexual desire, its not daring to specify “the love,” is what prevents it from being a shoo-in as the first gay novel in English. Wilde is not to blame, of course (and notwithstanding that a few of the most suggestive sentences were excised by his publisher): late Victorian culture simply did not allow for a more explicit exploration of the affectionate whose name could not be spoken, much less elevated to a main role in a novel. Thus Dorian’s affairs are all with women, starting with the actress Sibyl Vane, for whom h The novella’s original critics trashed it as “a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous manual, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction,” forcing Stoddart’s edits and even a final round of omissions by Wilde himself. . But we’re now living in a Gaga / Glee kinda world and the Harvard Un The Masculinization of Dorian Gray Over time, perceptions of Oscar Wilde’s works have changed significantly. Initially considered scandalous and used against him as evidence of gross indecency, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is now regularly introduced to readers as a canonically gay novel. However, attitudes towards homosexuality had started to shift by the time James Joyce’s Dubliners (1916) was published, as a direct result of Wilde’s sensationalised persecution. This article analyses Joyce and Wilde’s characters through the lens of necropolitics and examines how homosexual panic and gender inequality contributed to the tragic, preventable deaths of women and gay men. By depicting the effects of these societal influences, both Joyce and Wilde criticise the strict moral codes that governed the public and private lives of ‘sexual deviants’ oppressed within a heterosexist system, factors which can be deduced from the treatment of the era’s proscription of gay relationships, the colonial situation, and gender imbalances promoted by the strict moral codes of the time. Coined by Achille Mbembe, the term ‘necropolitics’ refers to how neoliberal systems exhaust those lives who accomplish not contri
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Preface:
Tracking the representation of Dorian Gray is an extremely daunting undertaking. Luckily, another student had done some of the heavy lifting in this blog publish for the class during 2013. Meg M provides references to Dorian’s many interpretations. I am grateful for the help in the detective work of uncovering the picture, so to pronounce, of Dorian Gray. I am also going to be talking about femmephobia (the concept of anti-femininity, a rejection of gender expressions that could be related to femininity) in specifically homosexual, mostly cis, male culture and how it is replicated and reinvented throughout history and in adaptations of Dorian Gray. I am very appreciative of the concept of adaptation, and believe they are valid, this is simply a study on a pattern that I have noticed throughout this multiplicity of Dorian Gray. [Content warning for some homophobic language and rhetoric about sex]
When I had first develop interested in The Picture of Dorian Gray, I was at once taken with his image description in the novel. He is introduced to the reader as “certainly, wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue
Introduction